When computers first made their way into society, few people could afford a machine for themselves. At best, individuals had a single machine at work on which they could work. But as computers have become more affordable, people find themselves working with several machines. It is increasingly common for people to find themselves working on one machine at the office, a second machine at home, and having use of a portable computer when they need to have computer access while traveling.
The Internet has also effected a change on society. With the availability of low cost connections and public access points, people can access information across networks of varying sizes (local, national, global) almost anywhere they might want to.
But with the increasing number of machines a person might find himself using comes an added complexity. Since a person typically accesses the same files from the various computers, the user needs to be certain that the files he is accessing are current.
Originally, people carried files on floppy disks from one machine to the next. But the increases in file size sometimes make floppy disks impractical. And if the user forgets to bring the files with him as he moves around, or forgets to move the latest versions of the files off the computer he most recently used, the user can find himself with several versions of the files, each of which contain desired portions.
Accordingly, a need remains for a way to maintain distributed files across multiple clients, maintaining currency at each client as changes are made, to address these and other problems associated with the prior art.